Today I worked on color sanding, then laying down another coat of paint.

Who likes wet sanding? *crickets*

Next was heating up the paint. This increases pressure and helps the mixing process. It gives you a smoother coat.

I painted another coat. Glamor shots:

I'm pretty happy with the finish right now, but I may color sand one more time then lay down one more coat. Not sure quite yet. Leaning toward sand + coat one more time just for a *little better finish.

I painted the inside of the cabinet and laid down a strip of the white vinyl accent. I was quite unhappy with the durability of the spraypainted finish.At this point I decided that I would just wrap the whole damn cabinet in vinyl.

Completed the accents where I could - cant do the top half until the provisions for the cover glass are in place.

I dragged the cabinet inside. Here's the wall just waiting for mounting.

This is the back side with the HDTV mounts in place.

Here is mid wrap on the top surface. I used 3m 1080 satin black

Now THIS is the finish I wanted.

Here are the cabinet doors wrapped in vinyl as well

And mounted on their hinges. This really came out fantastic.

I made some mounting tabs for the speakers

Looking down inside the cabinet you can see a speaker and the amp sitting there.

Getting the height right on the wall.

I'm quite pleased with the progress. Next up is to get the glass figured out and the speaker grill completed. The marquee I'm treating as sort of a separate project for now.

That vinyl wrap looks great for a smooth pro looking satin finish. I've never used it, but I'm assuming it's applied using a heat gun? I plan to use vinyl wrap on part of my Pacman Legion project. There is a huge variety of textures and colours available. It definitely has a place in this hobby. BTW, I do enjoy wet sanding paintwork. Especially 2000 grit work.. Yeah baby! Very relaxing and therapeutic. But that is preparatory to high gloss work, not smooth satin or low gloss finishes.

Yep, the vinyl goes on dry and has a crosshatch to allow air escape before you push down on the pressure activated adhesive. A heat gun is used to pull around radiuses as well as to "set" the adhesive at the end of the wrapping.

I highly recommend the 3m 1080 automotive vinyl that I used for this. You'll need a base coat of real paint for it to adhere to though, not a raw MDF panel. It gave me really good results and is quite durable. You can even "heat" out scratches with a heat gun to some extent.

There will be two admin buttons, "Abort" (exit) and "Delay" (pause) to keep with my space theme.That's it. They will go in the bigger pill shape up and to the right of the P1 position. The circle up and to the left of P2 is for a spinner.

I've used button combinations in the past to enter Mame's control panel. I'll almost certainly do the same on this machine.

The buttons themselves are triangle red illuminated arcade buttons. The spinner will be a groovy spinner in red as well.

As others have said it's better to drill a smaller hole and route your plastic but it's not the worst mistake in the world (make sure your router base is clean though- I've ruined a few pieces by having crap collect on the router base)

Really like the way the cp is integrated into the overall panel. That looks like it was machine cut. V nice.